JBH Blog: The content marketing blog

The Mixology of Content Marketing Infographic

With 77% of marketers now utilising content marketing and 69% now creating more content than they did a year ago, delivering the right mix of content to your audience is essential.

To help you improve your content marketing efforts we’ve curated The Mixology of Content Marketing infographic – serving up advice on how to create and deliver optimised content with some healthy stats from Hubspot and SmartInsights thrown in for good measure!

Getting Your Measures Right: The key is finding the right stories to engage your audience and hitting them at the right time. Identify the tastes of your readership as well as how and when they prefer to consume news.

Mixology Masters: The Content Marketing Association and Hubspot are industry news masters, gathering the choicest news and trends from contributors and distributing it to an engaged audience. Be sure to use your existing networks to reach more potential fans.

Social Video (Margarita)

Serving Suggestions: Best served with an edge, shared with friends and jazzed up with a colourful accessory or two (think jokes, life hacks and striking imagery.)

1 part entertainment

1 part clear message

1 part colourful artistic appeal

Getting your measures right:

The nature of video content makes it relatively easy to monitor the reach of your content, including total views, views from your demographic, shares, subscribers and that all-important CTR.

Mixology Masters:

It’s easier to make a statement using a visual medium; virtually anything is possible. Brands who Vine well include Ikea with its cute colourful life hacks and Innocent with its beautiful eco-warrior friendly imagery (Prince William using a machete to crack open a coconut anyone?).

Viral Content (Tom Collins)

Serving Suggestions: Identify what you want your content to achieve and allow that information to decide whether you play up the sour twist or the sugar-sweet finish.

1 part strong message

1 parts compelling story

Comedy garnish (optional)

Getting Your Measures Right:

Compelling and sharable, viral content is the single fastest way to the top of the search engine. When assessing the success of your viral campaigns pay special attention to lead generation, brand exposure and conversion.

Mixology Masters:

Sport England had a huge hit challenging negative body image this year with its “This Girl Can” campaign, inspiring more women to get active. It will also be a while before anyone can forget the Cadbury’s gorilla.

Infographics (Singapore Sling)

Serving Suggestions: Get the design right and watch your data come alive.

2 parts clear storyline

1 part quality data

1 part hard-hitting stats

1 part striking design

Getting Your Measures Right:

You can sling all the data in the world at it, but if you don’t have a compelling story to tell your audience, your infographic will miss the mark.

Mixology Masters:

LinkedIn is adept at creating simple engaging infographics like its ‘A Well Balanced Blog’, while Custom Made and Ghergich & Co effectively spell out the scale of a big problem in ‘Spiralling Out of Control: Plastic Buildup In Our Oceans’

White papers (Old Fashioned)

Serving Suggestions: Serve up detailed information with a twist that shows you understand the requirements of your niche.

4 parts rich, in-depth information

1 part clear, concise presentation

Getting Your Measures Right:

In order to make your company credible and generate leads, keep anything sweet or sour to a minute dash. Your strong point is the information you have to offer.

Serving Suggestions: The trick is to take an original take on a subject or theme, add a clear storyline and top it up with enough convincing language to keep your audience with you until the end.

1 part strong, sound grasp of audience

1 part fresh subject

3 parts clear story

Getting Your Measures Right:

While people expect to log some reading time when dealing with long-form, remember that successful content invariably requires a focus on quality over quantity.

Mixology Masters:

While social news and entertainment sites like Buzzfeed have been championing long-form content more and more recently, business news site Quartz has developed the “Quartz Curve,” a formula that predicts the success of content based on the longer length it favours.

User Generated Content (Piña Colada)

Serving Suggestions: Take a holiday with this one and pass on the serving suggestions to your users. Suggest a theme, hashtag or even using the product as a common prop to relate all that brilliant content back to your brand.

1 part branding

1 part creativity

3 parts user experience

Hashtag garnish (optional)

Getting Your Measures Right:

Take a back seat as much as possible. Consumers are usually more interested in hearing what their friends think than in what brands have to say.

Mixology Masters:

Both Coca-Cola with its personalised bottles and Starbucks with its designer doodle coffee cups have enjoyed big success with user generated campaigns and drinking vessels in recent years!

Blogs (Daiquiri)

Serving Suggestions: Flavour your blog with the stuff that matters in your industry. Aim at a target audience and make sure that you only get as technical as that audience requires.

1 part specialist industry knowledge

1 part strong examples

1 part consistency

Getting Your Measures Right:

While it is imperative that your blogs are interesting and useful, bear in mind that they also need to be easily digestible at no more than about 400-800 words.

Mixology Masters:

With an estimated 110 million estimated monthly users, there’s no denying that the Huffington Post is one hell of a popular blog. As far as content marketing is concerned, specialist sites like Copyblogger and Contently are a great source of relevant industry information.

Jane Hunt is the Marketing Director and Co-founder of JBH - The Content Marketing Agency. Jane is passionate about content marketing and works strategically with brands to plan and execute actionable content and campaigns. Jane is a regular contributor to international digital marketing resource Smart Insights.